Sunday, March 27, 2011

3/27: We are go for launch, 3DS!

3DS, welcome to the family. Today is the first day of the rest of your life. We're going to try to love you as much as we can.

You're made by Nintendo. You're one of eleven children Nintendo has, not counting some other relatives from earlier marriages, which we won't get into right now: it gets pretty soap opera-y. Suffice to say all eyes are on you right now, with your ability to take 3D photographs, play 3D games, and do all the other DS stuff millions of people do every day.

It's a rough world, and people can be mean. They'll criticize you for your three-hour battery life. They'll ask where Mario is, where Zelda is, where Kid Icarus is. That's okay: you're young, You don't have to be perfect right off the bat. You can learn from these growing-pains mistakes, and in a year or two you'll be in tremendous shape. Don't beat yourself up over no working game store or no Internet connection yet. You have to learn to crawl first.

Let me draw this to a close before I run the analogy into the ground by figuring out which launch game counts as the meconium. (Suggest away at jeffryan1@gmail.com, though.) You're going to do just fine: you've got a feature everyone will want. Within a few years, in fact, everyone probably will have it. So you'll be a trendsetter! Just don't let it go to your head. And seriously, if you could work on upping that battery life to four hours, that'd be swell. Some of us have Nintendogs to pet.

***

Today in Mario also brings up a project I've been working on for months, and which I can't share yet. So I feel like a bit of a secret agent, or perhaps a popped-collar d-bag, when I say that it's not yet ready to show off. But I can tell you it required a trip to the local party store to buy fake handcuffs and spirit gum. I did not get a look when I bought these two items, which tells me a lot about what a clerk there sees on a daily basis.